The new building on Montgomery Street is now the third in Hudson County that was specifically built or reconstructed to be a mosque.
The room feels immense and sacred already, and it isn’t even complete.
“When people drive by and they see this is a mosque, it’s taking up space,” said Dina Sayedahmed, a longtime community member in Bayonne’s mosque and now communications director at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, New Jersey. “That’s important for us to do, to take up space and to do it unapologetically. For so long, we’ve been in mosques in church basements, on top of storage facilities, on top of apartments.
As he spoke last week, more people streamed into the room where he and Chatha were sharing their stories. The federation began an appeal to the community for donations about five years ago, he said, adding that the project ultimately cost between $5 million and $6 million. Bayonne’s mosque faced challenges from the wider community, including a protest before its zoning application was scheduled to be heard. When it was not approved, the applicants sued, citing the Religious Land Use and Institutional Persons Act, eventually settling with the city.
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